S-200 in a German museum.Wikimedia Commons
In line with Ukrainian mag Pravda, the missile the Ukrainian air power used to shoot down an extraordinary Russian air power A-50 radar aircraft on Friday wasn’t an American-made Patriot, as many observers assumed.
No, it reportedly was once an ex-Soviet 5V28: the missile part of the S-200 air-defense device.
On reflection, it will have to had been glaring that one thing instead of a Patriot shot down the A-50. The lumbering radar aircraft was once round 120 miles from the entrance line in southern Ukraine when it plummeted to the bottom. The place a Patriot normally levels no farther than 90 miles, a S-200 can hit objectives 150 miles away or farther.
We already knew the Ukrainians had reactivated a few of their elderly S-200 batteries—out of 16 the Soviet air power as soon as maintained all throughout Ukraine—as a result of they’ve been lobbing them at objectives at the flooring in occupied Ukraine, or even in Russia itself.
We didn’t know the Ukrainians have been firing the brutish missiles at aerial objectives till this week.
However the building is smart. The S-200 isn’t essentially the most correct air-defense device on the earth. It’s surely much less correct than the Patriot is. However what the S-200 lacks in finesse, it makes up for in sheer energy.
The eight-ton 5V28 “is a honking giant missile with a truly heavy and voluminous seeker house,” wrote Trent Telenko, a former high quality auditor with the U.S. Protection Contract Control Company. The 5V28 packs a large, 500-pound warhead.
The Soviet Union advanced the S-200 within the early Nineteen Sixties in particular to focus on U.S. Air Drive heavy bombers. Ukraine after all retired the air-defense dinosaurs greater than a decade in the past owing to their relative cumbersomeness—they’re heavy and ponderous and tough to move—in addition to the top value of upgrading them.
However an improve was once at the desk. Prior to the present, wider battle, the Ukrainian executive thought to be reactivating some S-200s and retrofitting them with the similar new seeker Ukrainian business had advanced for the smaller S-125 air-defense device.
Given the slightly excellent accuracy of the resuscitated Ukrainian S-200s within the surface-to-surface function, there’s a great opportunity Kyiv’s engineers have put in a greater seeker within the 5V28: both the S-125’s new seeker or every other type. Whether or not that very same seeker would possibly paintings within the surface-to-air function is an open query.
Regardless, the Friday shoot-down was once a go back to shape for a vintage missile the Soviets in particular designed for killing giant, sluggish planes. An A-50 is not anything if now not giant and sluggish.
Now, the billion-dollar query: what number of 5V28s does Ukraine have left? The Ukrainian air power will have possessed masses—even 1000—missiles when it closing retired the S-200 round 2013.
However giant, chemical-filled missiles don’t closing without end. So it’s imaginable the Ukrainians were given contemporary batches of 5V28s from their allies who nonetheless perform the S-200. The Poles, perhaps. And even the Bulgarians.
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